Editorial: CEQA is too easily weaponized to block housing
One other 12 months and lawmakers are once more confronted with the thorny however vital job of reforming the California Environmental High quality Act, the landmark regulation that has improved numerous development initiatives. However CEQA lawsuits have additionally too usually been used to thwart progress on the state’s most urgent wants by stalling or blocking vital initiatives.
Within the newest instance of CEQA run amok, a California appellate court docket is contemplating whether or not noisy school college students are an environmental impression, akin to air pollution or habitat loss, that needs to be addressed earlier than UC Berkeley can construct a brand new dormitory to ease its scholar housing scarcity.
The case entails the college’s plan to develop Folks’s Park, a swath of open house owned by the college and claimed by protesters in 1969, with housing for 1,100 college students and supportive housing for 125 homeless individuals, together with a clinic, public market and landscaped open house.
Neighborhood teams sued to dam the venture, arguing the college violated CEQA. In a tentative ruling issued in December, the first District Courtroom of Enchantment in San Francisco agreed the college did not adequately research sure impacts, together with noise. The ruling mentioned that as a result of school children may be loud when speaking, ingesting and partying, the college ought to have studied and sought to scale back the “social noise” from future scholar residents.
Berkeley’s attorneys argue that noise from people socializing shouldn’t be thought of an environmental impression, and it’s a harmful precedent to require extra environmental evaluation based mostly on who’s going to stay in a housing growth. Would housing for the aged immediate the identical evaluation? Some CEQA specialists warned the choice, if finalized, may give Not-in-My-Yard litigants a robust new software to dam housing and different growth initiatives.
The tentative choice additionally takes intention at UC Berkeley’s plan to broaden enrollment and construct extra dorms close by over the following 15 years, saying the college failed to check whether or not the long-term progress plan may have environmental impacts by growing gentrification and homelessness. Whereas these are actual points within the Bay Space, they haven’t been thought of environmental impacts beneath CEQA.
If the ruling turns into last, UC Berkeley could possibly be penalized for not analyzing its impression on the native housing scarcity and blocked from constructing dormitories to assist handle that scarcity in the identical choice. That’s one of many pitfalls of CEQA — the regulation solely considers the potential unfavourable results from a venture, with out giving equal weight to its advantages or the implications if the venture isn’t constructed. Sure, a dorm for 1,100 school college students may generate noise within the neighborhood however it should create much-needed housing in a walkable, bikeable city space with high quality public transit, which is precisely the place we needs to be constructing.
This, by the best way, is Spherical 2 of the UC Berkeley CEQA saga. Final 12 months the California Supreme Courtroom ordered Berkeley to freeze enrollment as a result of it hadn’t correctly analyzed the environmental impacts of admitting extra college students. The freeze would have pressured the college to reduce its 2022 class by one-third, however legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom shortly handed a slim CEQA exemption that lifted the enrollment cap.
Lawmakers are contemplating one other CEQA exemption invoice for UC Berkeley if the courts halt the Folks’s Park dorm growth.
And that’s been the story of CEQA reform over time. A CEQA case gums up a political precedence and lawmakers rush to create an exemption or a quick monitor. Skilled soccer stadiums, basketball arenas and company headquarters had been among the many first developments to get CEQA carve-outs. Legislators have more and more handed exemptions for homeless and inexpensive developments, sure scholar housing initiatives, mixed-income housing in business areas and for bike, bus and transit initiatives.
However the exemptions may be slim, piecemeal and never all the time sufficient to insulate vital initiatives from being waylaid by CEQA challenges. That’s why broader CEQA reform is so desperately wanted.
CEQA itself just isn’t the issue. The regulation was enacted greater than 40 years in the past as a option to inform, shield and empower the general public by requiring builders to reveal the environmental results of their initiatives and to scale back hurt they might trigger. The regulation has made many initiatives higher. CEQA lawsuits have required warehouse initiatives within the Inland Empire to scale back neighbors’ publicity to diesel exhaust and compelled builders constructing in high-fire-risk areas to make their initiatives safer.
However it has additionally been abused. It’s too straightforward to tie up initiatives with expensive and time-consuming lawsuits for causes that don’t have anything to do with environmental safety. Organized labor teams have used the specter of CEQA lawsuits to power builders to rent unionized labor. Corporations have filed lawsuits to dam competitors. Householders teams have used CEQA to cease development or shrink the scale of residence complexes. Earlier this month, an oil firm filed a CEQA lawsuit towards Los Angeles, saying town did not do an environmental research of the results of phasing out oil manufacturing.
Whereas there may be normal settlement in Sacramento that CEQA needs to be reformed, there isn’t the political will to get it accomplished. There are too many stakeholders, notably labor unions, that don’t need to lose the leverage CEQA provides them and too few lawmakers keen to tackle these pursuits. With main laws unlikely, authorized specialists have urged Newsom and his administration to make use of their authority to draft clear, broad exemptions for city infill growth and clean-energy initiatives. This needs to be a pure subsequent step for Newsom, who’s been keen to wield govt authority to push his housing and local weather objectives.
California has a lot work to do to make this state extra inexpensive, equitable and sustainable. State leaders can’t enable CEQA for use as an obstacle to progress.
